Google Developer Group Johannesburg

Google Developer Group Johannesburg

As Rabbits, we have a thirst, for beer, for coffee and most of all for knowledge. To quench our thirst for knowledge some of us went to the Google Developer Group (GDG) Johannesburg meetup, to learn about Google and Google technologies.

Where Google is headed

While chowing down on pizza and drinking beer, we started off by going through everything that happened at the I/O#17 conference. (Having limited time, I will confer only some of the highlights of the conference. The other highlights can be found here.)

Google is converting Android from Java to Kotlin. Kotlin is a programming language, created by Jetbrain and can also be compiled to Javascript. So what exactly makes this language so amazing? Well, you don’t completely need to change your entire app! It works with Java and C++, and has wonderful safety features. It is concise and best of all? It’s open source.

The next thing we discussed was Google Lens. This technology will allow smartphones to use the phone’s camera and a Google AI to recognise objects the phone is “seeing”, including scanning your router sticker and then magically connect to your home network.

Big fan of VR? Google is planning to create an Android-powered VR headset that tracks virtual space with “WorldSense”. WorldSense is a technology that is created from the Tango Augmented reality system.

Another amazing thing we learned about is Aaudio. This is a high-performance API that will be released with Android O, it is designed for high-performance audio applications that require low latency.

Code Readability

After that, we had a discussion on how to avoid broken bridges in programming – a clean approach to Android development. The Model–View–Presenter (MVP) pattern was one of the suggestions. The MVP pattern allows for easy testability, agility and improves separation of concerns.

Reactive Programming

The meetup was closed off with one of my favourites… Angular! Request and Responses are old-school. Angular is now introducing streams! RXJS uses Observables to send data continuously over time and Angular 2 introduced the async pipe behaviour. Angular’s async pipe can allow streaming data over a WebSockets and seeing as SOCKET.IO 2.0 is available, you can create a powerful real-time engine.

Afterwards, we chatted with some of the speakers and then we got some coffee and candy. We will definitely come back next month, for the beer, coffee and the knowledge. This meetup happens on the first Wednesday of each month, and is literally perfect for any Google fan! For more information about the Google Developer Group follow them on Twitter @GDGJohannesburg or checkout their meetup page.